Who Writes Wikipedia?

I saw this quote floating around on a few sites today including Andrew Sullivan's post The Wiki Core.

"Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. 'I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.' The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from 'people who [are] contributing ... a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix ... or something like that.'"

Well if you follow the links to the original article, as I usually try to do, you get to Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought, Who Writes Wikipedia?. Yep the above quote is from there, but it's just the start of the article. Yes Wales claimed the above, but if read the rest of the article, Swartz didn't believe it and did his own investigation, which he describes, and concluded:

"When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content."